Retiring UCI coach O'Boyle perfects art of his profession

UC Irvine track and cross country coach Vince O'Boyle edned his 32-year career at the university at the \NCAA West Regional cross country meet last Friday. FILE

IRVINE – He is a man who holds no secrets.

In a coaching career that covers parts of five decades, UC Irvine cross country and track coach Vince O’Boyle has been generous to a fault with other coaches and athletes and not too proud to admit he’s borrowed from the best. The true key to O’Boyle’s success, however, is not found on a workout sheet posted on a locker room wall or in a training diary or an afternoon of 400-meter repeats.

“Everyone talks about the science of coaching, exercise physiology and biomechanics and it’s important. And there are a lot of variables in writing a workout,” Cornell coach Lou Duesing said in trying to explain his longtime friend’s success. “But what I believe is most important is the art of coaching: finding out with each person what’s going to work, what isn’t going to work.

“Great painters know the science of using colors, how different colors work together, but in the end it’s the application to a canvas that determines what is in fact a great piece.”

On a canvas that stretches from the early 1970s to the NCAA West Regional cross country meet Friday, his final meet after 32 seasons at UCI, O’Boyle has produced at least two masterpieces as well as a string of gems perhaps only best appreciated and understood by other masters. It is those coaches and athletes who realize that O’Boyle’s real strength and vision came not in broad, sweeping strokes but in small, subtle touches; his ability as Olympic middle distance runner Ruth Wysocki said, to instill in his athletes “a belief that, ‘Hey, this is possible.’”

O’Boyle, 67, was the architect behind both an upset that rocked the track world on the eve of the 1984 Olympic Games, Wysocki’s stunning victory over Olympic cover girl Mary Decker at the Olympic Trials, and one of the most thrilling races in NCAA championships history, Charles Jock’s duel with Virginia’s Robby Andrews in the 2011 NCAA 800-meter final. In between, O’Boyle guided the U.S. women to the silver medal at the 1992 World Cross Country Championships and has been college cross country’s version of a BCS buster. Chris Petersen with a stopwatch. His 1990 UCI women’s cross country team, the best in a series of underfunded yet overachieving, giant-slaying squads, finished fourth at NCAAs, knocking off superpowers Oregon, Arkansas and Wisconsin.

“He has this willingness to always learn,” Duesing said. “(It’s rare) for someone who’s had success along the way as he’s had but is always wanting to learn, always wanting to do a better job, not afraid to ask, not afraid to learn. To me that’s the sign of an artist still creating.”

Which is why O’Boyle might be the only coach to have athletes on the cover of Track & Field News, the self-proclaimed bible of the sport, 27 years apart. Yet, while ever evolving, O’Boyle has remained true to himself and a set of core beliefs. He is a warm, mischievous and an unapologetically sentimental man; quick to smile, joke and needle, and just easily moved to tears.

Through the tears this much was always clear to his athletes: O’Boyle’s unwavering belief in them and that he was there for the long haul. He coached Wysocki for 22 years.

“Again it’s that philosophy of developing over a period of time,” O’Boyle said. “Ruth didn’t walk in and set the world on fire. She had more bad races than good races. She never quit, she never gave up on herself, she never quit trying. So you look at that and that was important to me.”

Wysocki didn’t quit because O’Boyle never quit on her. Wysocki, her triumph over Decker forgotten by a sport with a short attention span, once cracked, “In 1984 my shoe sponsor said it would take care of me for life. I guess I died in 1988.” O’Boyle, however, hung with her, guiding Wysocki, at 38, to the 1995 World Championships 1,500 final.

“It takes time and if you’re in it for the long haul, you’ll have a legacy, an identity,” said O’Boyle, who came to UCI as cross country coach in 1982 and then took over the track program two years later.

O’Boyle at a young age embraced the role of underdog and an identity shaped by his childhood in Monrovia growing up in a working-class Irish family, frequented by tragedy.

He fell in love running in grade school while competing in CYO meets.

“I just liked it,” O’Boyle said. “The competitiveness. Time meant something to me, obviously we all understand time. But when you head up against somebody it’s just a footrace. It’s always been a footrace. If you can beat somebody then let the time take care of itself.”

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